Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Fahad

See my response to Munther above.  Do you think that changing to centre1.org.au, centre2.org.au might be an improvement over subfolders?

Ian

Thanks Munther

Each centre is individually branded and managed so I don't think sub folders would have really worked in this case.  There are also a number of smaller centres that are already in subfolders of the main site.  My concern is that the amount of similar content in sub folders and sub domains and wanting to rank for similar keywords for those sub domains or pages might be diluting the rankings overall.  Also it appears in some cases the main domain might be taking precedent over the individual centres for rankings.

Ian

Hi All

Wanting some advice.  I have a client which has a number of individual centres that are part of an umbrella organisation.  Each individual centre has its own web site and some of these sites have similar (not duplicate content) products and services.  Currently the individual centres are sub domains of the umbrella organisation.

i.e. Umbrella organisation www.organisation.org.au

Individual centres are sub domains i.e. www.centre1.organisation.org.au, www.centre2.organisation.org.au etc.

I'm feeling that perhaps this setup might be affecting the rankings of the individual sites because they are sub domains.

Would love to hear some thoughts or experience on this and whether its worth going through the process of migrating the individual centre domains.

Thanks

Ian

Thanks again Alan.

I've checked the site with screaming frog and it doesn't return any url's with parameters so at this stage I might be ok.  I am getting a message in webmaster tools saying "severe health issues" but it doesn't appear to be affecting the urls I want to keep.  I'll likely remove the entry once things have cleared up some more.

Thanks Jeff

At the moment I'm stuck with Zeus web server (insert expletives here) so no htaccess file or I'd be in a better position.  After messing around with it and very limited documentation I can only get the site operating with index.php in the url but with SEF url's for the remainder of it.  I'm investigating migration to an apache server so that might make it easier.

Regards

Ian

Thanks Tom

That's a good point.  Part of my problem lies in the number of URL's with parameters (thousands).  Applying status codes of any type isn't really viable.

Starting to see the url's clean up with the addition of the entries in robot.txt.

Regards

Ian

OK Might have a solution that would at least work for my situation.

Since implementing SEF URL's on the site I have no real need for any URL's with parameters.  By adding the following to robots.txt it should prevent any indexing of old pages or pages with parameters.

Disallow: /index.php?*

Tested it in webmaster tools with some of the offending URL's and it seems to work.  I'll wait until the next indexing and post back or mark it as answered.

OK Might have a solution that would at least work for my situation.

Since implementing SEF URL's on the site I have no real need for any URL's with parameters.  By adding the following to robots.txt it should prevent any indexing of old pages or pages with parameters.

Disallow: /index.php?*

Tested it in webmaster tools with some of the offending URL's and it seems to work.  I'll wait until the next indexing and post back or mark it as answered.

Thanks for your input Alan

There lies my problem.  The URL's don't exist but give a 200 response.

http://domain.com/index.php?vc=427&Buy_Pinnacle_Studio_14_Ultimate is the same as

http://domain.com/index.php which is the same as

http://domain.com/?type_anything_here_and it still gives a 200 response.  Joomla seems to just ignore parameters from non existing pages after the ?.  I found a lot of people are having similar problems here http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=618&t=699954.

Once in googles index I can't see a way of getting rid of thousands or redundant entries.  I have the added problem of the site being hosted on a Zeus Web Server which isn't as well documented as apache.

I'm currently looking into wild cards in robots.txt. It will be a slow process to get rid of them all but might finally help me clean up the index.

Ian

Hi All

This follows on from a previous question (http://moz.com/community/q/how-to-fix-google-index-after-fixing-site-infected-with-malware) that on further investigation has become a much broader problem.  I think this is an issue that may plague many sites following upgrades from CMS systems.

First a little history.  A new customer wanted to improve their site ranking and SEO.  We discovered the site was running an old version of Joomla and had been hacked.  URL's such as http://domain.com/index.php?vc=427&Buy_Pinnacle_Studio_14_Ultimate redirected users to other sites and the site was ranking for buy adobe or buy microsoft.  There was no notification in webmaster tools that the site had been hacked.  So an upgrade to a later version of Joomla was required and we implemented SEF URLs at the same time.  This fixed the hacking problem, we now had SEF url's, fixed a lot of duplicate content and added new titles and descriptions.  Problem is that after a couple of months things aren't really improving.  The site is still ranking for adobe and microsoft and a lot of other rubbish and the urls like http://domain.com/index.php?vc=427&Buy_Pinnacle_Studio_14_Ultimate are still sending visitors but to the home page as are a lot of the old redundant urls with parameters in them.  I  think it is default behavior for a lot of CMS systems to ignore parameters it doesn't recognise so http://domain.com/index.php?vc=427&Buy_Pinnacle_Studio_14_Ultimate displays the home page and gives a 200 response code.

My theory is that Google isn't removing these pages from the index because it's getting a 200 response code from old url's and possibly penalizing the site for duplicate content (which don't showing up in moz because there aren't any links on the site to these url's)  The index in webmaster tools is showing over 1000 url's indexed when there are only around 300 actual url's.  It also shows thousands of url's for each parameter type most of which aren't used.

So my question is how to fix this, I don't think 404's or similar are the answer because there are so many and trying to find each combination of parameter would be impossible.  Webmaster tools advises not to make changes to parameters but even so I don't think resetting or editing them individually is going to remove them and only change how google indexes them (if anyone knows different please let me know)

Appreciate any assistance and also any comments or discussion on this matter.

Regards, Ian

Thanks all for you help

A little more information and maybe a little more advice required.

Since fixing the malware http://domain.com/index.php?vc=201&Cheap_Adobe_Acrobat_xi and similar are actually no longer pages.  Joomla actually sees anything after ? as a parameter and just ignores it because it no longer matches a page and hence the reason it just defaults to the home page http://domain.com/index.php.  This is Joomla and probably most other content management systems default behavior.  The problem here lies in the fact that google indexed that page when it was infected and it remains in the index because to google it sees a status code of 200 when re-indexing this page.

The problem is now a bit broader and has more ramifications than first thought.  Any pages from the previous system that used parameters would receive a 200 status code and remain in the index.  Checking url parameters in web master tools confirms this with various paramaters showing thousands of url's monitored.  Keep in mind google is showing a message that there are no problems with parameters for this site.

So the advice I need now is related to url parameters in Web Master tools.  The new site uses SEF URLS and so makes much less use of paramaters.  How can I ensure that the old redundant pages with parameters are dropped from the index.  This would involve thousands of 301's or 404's let alone trying to work them all out.  There is a reset link for each parameter in webmaster tools but not much documentation as to what it does.  If I reset all the parameters would that clean up the index?

I'd be interested in what others think about this issue because I feel that this might be a common problem with cms based platforms and after major changes, thousands of paramater based url's just defaulting to home and other pages probably affects the site and page ranking.

Ian

You're right, I guess I was focused on the index.  Moz isn't showing any external links to these pages and neither is webmaster tools.  My feeling is that google is retaining them for some reason, maybe just the keywords in the url?

I've checked the source of the visits and they are only coming form google searches for "cheap adobe" and the like.  The original malware used the site to get these searches into the index and then direct them to other sites/pages.

Being a Zeus server it doesn't use htaccess, my task would be a lot simple if it did.  It has an alternative rewrite file but documentation is scarce on using it for 404's.

I'll keep researching.

Thanks Paul

I've checked analytics and the only source of these url's is google organic searches, not external sites.  I think unfortunately my problem is the dynamic nature of Joomla and a combination of a number of factors that are causing it to do this in an SEO unfriendly way.

I think my biggest challenge is getting the URL's to 404 before I submit them to the web master removal tool (which my research tells me needs to be done before you submit).  I think I read there might be a robots.txt option so I'll look into that.

Ian

Thanks Alan

This seems to be done by the combination of Joomla/Zeus and the redirection manager.  No longer infected, the only visits are from organic searches from google and it's been a couple of months.  Whatever the reason Joomla feels it shouldn't 404 these pages and just displays (not 301 redirects them) to the home page.

My feeling is that these URL's in the index and the visits from them probably aren't doing the site any good.

Thanks Dave

I think this might be a good option but I have a couple of problem with trying to achieve this.  It's a joomla cms running on a zeus server with a Search Engine Friendly URL plugin running.  I think that is possibly the worst combination of technologies for SEO in history.  The combination of url rewrites in zeus and the redirection manager in Zeus just display the home page with the dodgey URL and give it a 200 status code.  I think this is why google is taking so long to drop it from the index.

Ian

Hi All

Upgraded a Joomla site for a customer a couple of months ago that was infected with malware (it wasn't flagged as infected by google).  Site is fine now but still noticing search queries for "cheap adobe" etc with links to http://domain.com/index.php?vc=201&Cheap_Adobe_Acrobat_xi in web master tools (about 50 in total).  These url's redirect back to home page and seem to be remaining in the index (I think Joomla is doing this automatically)

Firstly, what sort of effect would these be having on on their rankings?  Would they be seen by google as duplicate content for the homepage (moz doesn't report them as such as there are no internal links).

Secondly what's my best plan of attack to fix them.  Should I setup 404's for them and then submit them to google?  Will resubmitting the site to the index fix things?

Would appreciate any advice or suggestions on the ramifications of this and how I should fix it.

Regards, Ian

Thanks Mike.

I think part of my problem is that being a CMS a lot of the code is automatically generated.   Therefore the code in the header of the blog archives is the same as the code in the header for a blog post.  Therefore I guess I'm stuck unless I can find some kind of SEO plug in for Umbraco.  It was set up by another web company so I'm not very familiar with it.

If anyone has experience with this situation in Umbraco I'd love some advice.

Regards

Ian

Hi All

Would love some help, fairly new at SEO and using SEOMoz, I've looked through the forums and have just managed to confuse myself.

I have a customer with a lot of duplicate page title/content errors in SEOMoz.  It's an umbraco CMS and a lot of the errors appear to be blog archives and pagination.  i.e.

http://example.com/blog

http://example.com/blog/

http://example.com/blog/?page=1

http://example.com/blog/?page=2

and then also

http://example.com/blog/2011/08

http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=1

http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=2

http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=3 (empty page)

http://example.com/blog/2011/08?page=4 (empty page)

This continues for different years and months and blog entries and creates hundreds of errors.

What's the best way to handle this for the SEOMoz report and the search engines.  Should I rel=canonical the /blog page?  I think this would probably affect the SEO of all the blog entries? Use robots.txt?  Sitemaps?  URL parameters in the search engines?

Appreciate any assistance/recommendations

Thanks in advance

Ian